The numbers do not lie. Despite the hunger for sports, the forced stay at home in front of the screen and the ban on getting on the pitches; Although the NBA has built an almost perfect Corona protocol; Despite the tremendous competition in the playoffs and finals between major TV markets; Still, the ratings for watching the best basketball league games in the world were at a low last season. Commissioner Adam Silver was supposed to pluck his hair with concern. No ticket sales, declining merchandise revenue and now even poor viewing figures are a death blow to the league’s revenue and future.
So how is it that Silver continues to transmit business as a habit and spreads optimism like a radiator dissipates heat? To understand this you need to consider a few things: who owns the NBA teams (compared to the owners of football teams, the most successful league in America) in terms of age and source of capital, what is the difference between new money and old money in terms of behavior patterns and investment channels, and if you look On the picture of Silver you will find that he does not really have hair to pluck.
Silver. He is calm
(Photo: AFP)
Let’s start with the numbers. The final series between Miami and the Lakers achieved an average rating of 7.45 million viewers per game, a 49 percent drop compared to the final series a year earlier between Golden State and Toronto. Although all sports suffered a significant drop in ratings (baseball 39 percent, hockey 25 percent, football 14 percent), in basketball it was felt most acutely. According to one explanation, that President Donald Trump was an active partner in its dissemination, the fact that the actors infiltrated the social issue into the halls, kneeling during the anthems and social messages on the backs of the shirts, caused many viewers to give up the pleasure. But a comparison between the segmentation of viewers in this year’s final series and that of 2019 reveals that there was no significant change in viewing differences between blacks and whites: 46 percent of viewers in 2019 were white. And this year? 45 percent.
On the other hand, it should be remembered that because of the Corona all the leagues played at the same time, and the spectators at home had more options than usual. The NBA had to compete outside of its regular annual schedule in a giant like the NFL, so it was difficult for it to promote its product in the media. In addition, the games were not only held during a plague that captured much of the attention of the American television consumer, but also during the last part of the presidential election. Two finals were played with the president hospitalized after contracting the disease (during the final series the ratings of the news channels jumped by 78 percent). Other factors that could explain the decline in ratings are the ban on converging in pubs and a change in home viewing habits, especially during the Corona curfew and with the rise in Netflix’s popularity.
The league has a $ 24 billion broadcasting rights deal with ESPN by 2025, so it’s not really worried. But there is a difference between not being worried and the nonchalance with which the league responded to the numbers. After all, it is clear to Silver that he will not receive similar amounts in the next agreement if his product does not provide the goods in viewing indices, so what’s the point? One answer is the average age of spectators: the average spectator in baseball is 53 (compared to 46 a decade ago), in football he is 47 (compared to 43 in 2010), while in basketball the average age is 37 (just like a decade ago). Basketball is the only sport where the average viewer not only does not age, but is in the coveted age range for advertising agencies (18-49). But age is not the only answer.
A look at the profiles of team owners in the NBA reveals that apart from being billionaires (many of them Jews), this is a fairly young group of rich people most of whom come from new money. Children of Baby Boomers, two working parents, a degree from a handsome university. Many of them made the money with both hands in banks and investment funds, in high-tech, in the media world. The owners of football teams, for comparison, are much older: inheritances, real estate, energy.
One way to see this conflict is to compare it to the battle between Amazon and Walmart. An even more accurate comparison would be between the economies of Germany and China. Germany’s economy is the old money. Her instinctive desire is to preserve the existing. China is new money. When China invests it seeks innovations, technology. She wants to control the future.
Football team owners care how many viewers watched the game on TV last night. For Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, this is almost a marginal detail. It is much more interesting for him to know how many watched the game on the Internet / mobile and what platform they used (and how many they saw illegally). The NBA dominates social media and leads in the number of young people who follow it. These figures are not yet quantifiable, but it is clear to Cuban and his friends that it is billions of dollars. And even more important: in the future. No league has positioned itself for launch with future technologies like the NBA. It does not sell numbers and statistics to its advertisers, but branding: urban, academic, young, well-technologically networked. It is much easier for an advertiser to follow an audience that surfs the web than one who watches TV in the armchair.
Cuban. Owner of the new variety
(Photo: AP)
Moreover, while television broadcasts allow a match between the advertiser and the viewer only within the time of the broadcast, the use of materials on social media takes place around the clock. The viewer can see the players in the locker rooms, in the warm-up and after the game. In addition, the use of social networks allows the transmitting body the ability to interact interactively with the user all over the world. This is the wet dream of advertisers.
This transition also translates into much more power for the players themselves. Not only can LeBron James and other players produce content for themselves and offer it to the league, but James himself has twice as many followers on his Twitter account than the NBA and NFL combined. No league has players with so many followers, no one has the content that meets the needs of the millennial generation. Today Durant’s dunk or Kerry’s threesome from Westbrook’s new glasses or for what reason James Harden was, but only slightly.
The league’s mobility, its possibility of being more flexible and open to innovation, also explains the decision to open the 2021 season at record speed. The league does not want to enter the fall months and compete with the baseball football and playoff leagues, but if the experiment this year succeeds it could be the new model of the basketball season: a league that begins around Christmas (one of its strongest broadcast days) and ends in July.
curry. One of the symbols of the league
(Photo: AP)
Add to that the estimates that demonstrations on the field and in the halls for social justice will decrease; That the league is a model for Corona (Fortune magazine even claimed that the US must appoint Silver as head of the Corona War); that life will return to normal thanks to the vaccine; Like Luca, Kwai, Kyrie, Kevin and Kerry who want to dispossess him – and one can understand why the league treats the fall in ratings as a small bump in its journey on the highway of the future.
In some ways the league as a product is in a strange state: it is a business that brought in nine billion dollars last year, but in terms of its business model it should treat itself as a start-up that must constantly innovate, refine, adapt to buyers’ desire and ease of use. This is a huge challenge, but if we learned anything about the NBA in 2020 it is that it looks huge challenges in the eye and makes them look down.
So everything goes back to Adam Silver again. The death of David Stern ended a period in the NBA. Even before the Corona and the struggles for social justice, it was clear that Silver was the right replacement. Stern changed basketball, turned it into an international, star-studded, hit rivalry. With so many covers, we almost forgot that there is also basketball to play. Here’s one thing Silver, the owners and the rest of the suits in the NBA offices must go back to doing to strengthen their power. Basketball in the last playoff was one long highlight of fine basketball in terms of individual, team, tactical, and coaching abilities. Maybe it’s time to go back and market the game itself.